In 1819 Lieutenant John Franklin took command of an expedition to the Arctic regions of northern Canada, with the task of surveying the coastline, particularly the stretch of it from the mouth of the Coppermine River to the easternmost part of the continent. Franklin was a courageous and enterprising man, who had joined the navy in his early teens and by his early thirties had not only experienced some of the most savage sea battles of the Napoleonic era but had also travelled as far afield as Brazil and Australia. With his natural curiosity and disciplined ways, he was the ideal expedition leader. But he nonethless got more than he bargained for; and the history of that feat of endurance, told in his Journey to the Polar Sea, becomes one of starvation, murder, despair, and the sheer misery of the struggle to survive.